Our traditional image of Chicago--as a gritty metropolis carved into
ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics
overshadows its ends--is such a powerful shaper of the city's identity
that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has
emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of
our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City--inherited from such
icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park,
Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko--with the goal of better understanding
Chicago as it is now: the third city.
Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from
its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center
whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and
the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to
1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a
shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a
growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy
sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom
reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious
provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to
Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a
self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood
revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for
the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to
understand Chicago under Daley's charge is to understand what
metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming
decades.
